Chapter 12: Between the Forgotten
Present situation
Perspective: Eiren
He was dreaming again.
Or maybe he wasn't.
The line had thinned too much lately.
Every night, he woke in strange places. In lives that weren't his. In faces he didn't remember wearing.
Last night, he'd been a judge passing a sentence.
The night before that, a woman whispering a prayer before her lover was executed.
And this time—
He stood on a cliff at dawn, holding a thread soaked in light.
"What is this?" he whispered.
A voice answered, soft and aching:
"A promise someone swore, long ago."
He turned, but no one stood there.
Only a warmth—like sunlight that remembered him.
Then came the cold.
A second thread, dark and gleaming like oil, slithered around the first.
It spoke without words:
Lie until they believe it. Mask until you forget yourself. Deceive until you're free.
Eiren awoke, gasping.
His hands still burned — one warm, one cold.
And above him, two System prompts blinked:
[New Thread Imprint Detected: Forgotten Sequence (Heartbound Fragment)]
➤ Emotion recalled but not understood.
➤ +1 Vow Unspoken
➤ Trait Gained: "Flicker of the Angel"
[Warning: Faker Influence Rising]
➤ Belief-Based Reality Shift at 4.2%
➤ Trait Gained: "Shadow of the Lie"
He didn't understand.
He wasn't a god. He wasn't a prophet. He was—
Who was he, again?
His breath caught.
There was a mirror shard on the ground — a fragment from a street vendor's stall shattered in last night's riot.
He picked it up.
His reflection flickered.
In one blink, he was himself.
In the next, he was masked, faceless.
In another—his eyes were gold. Wings made of memory and warmth shimmered behind him.
Two voices overlapped in his ears:
Lyra's: "You will be remembered by one whose heart still feels."
Velkaris's: "You will become me, because the world already believes you are."
He dropped the shard, hand trembling.
This wasn't possession. This was something deeper.
They were ghosts, yes — but not of the dead.
Ghosts of what the world had forgotten.
And they were bleeding into him.
Eiren staggered into an alley, heart racing.
He tried to focus. Think. Resist. But even the graffiti on the wall whispered.
One side painted a ring of gold thread, faded nearly invisible.
The other — a faceless white mask etched with a snake devouring itself.
"Why me?" he asked.
No one answered.
But he already knew.
Because he still felt.
Because he still doubted.
Because he stood between the lie and the love, the only soul fragile enough to carry both and not shatter immediately.
And in the Gray Fog above the world…
Klein looked up from his desk.
Two threads. Intertwined. Moving toward Eiren.
He narrowed his eyes.
"Someone's trying to overwrite a myth with another one…"
And somewhere in that twisting narrative—
Eiren wasn't the target.
He was the battlefield.
End of Chapter 12